magistrates, as the prisoner was not contesting the charge. The substance of Constance's confession was that, after waiting until the family and servants were asleep, she had opened the shutters and window in the drawing room, taken Francis from his room wrapped in a blanket that she had taken from between sheet and counterpane in his cot (leaving both these undisturbed or readjusted), left the residence and then killed him in the privy-house with a razor stolen from her father. It had been necessary to hide matches in the privy-house beforehand for a light to see by during the act of murder. The murder was not a spontaneous act, it seems, but one of revenge, and it was suggested that Constance had at certain times been mentally unbalanced. There was much speculation at the time that Constance's confession was false. Many supposed that her father, a known adulterer, was having an affair with Elizabeth Gough and murdered the child in a fit of rage after coitus interruptus. The theory fit a pattern with the senior Kent, who had romanced the family nanny, Mary Drewe Pratt, while his first wife Mary Ann Kent (Constance's mother) was dying, and subsequently married Pratt (Francis' mother). Many were suspicious of the senior Kent from the start, including the novelist Charles Dickens. However, in her book The Suspicions of Mr Whicher or The Murder at Road Hill House (2008), author Kate Summerscale concludes that if Constance's confession was indeed false and merely an act to shield another person, it was for the benefit of not her father but her brother, William Saville-Kent, with whom she shared a very close sibling relationship, which was further deepened by her father turning his paternal attentions away from the children of his first marriage to the children he had with his second wife. William was indeed suspected during the investigations but was never charged. Summerscale suggests that if William was not the culprit solely responsible for Francis's death, he was at least an accomplice to Constance. Constance never recanted her confession, even after her father's and her brother's deaths. She also kept her silence about the motive for the murder. In all of her statements, she emphasised and insisted that she bore no hatred nor jealousy toward her half-brother. As a result of her research, Summerscale comes to the conclusion that the murder of Francis was, no matter whether